For many years, the most commonly used enclosure for a tub/shower bathing facility has included a pair of sliding glass doors framed in metal. In a typical installation, an outer metal frame circumscribes the entry to the bath and is attached at the sides to the walls of the facility. The installation also includes a header spanning the entrance and a guide rail attached to the tub. The shower doors are hung at the top from the header and guided at the bottom by the rail so that they can slide back and forth in the entryway to allow entry and egress and to create a splash barrier.
There are several disadvantages with the described installation, both functional and aesthetic. First, the doors are always present in the entryway to the bathing area, thus always at least partially blocking the entrance and restricting free access to the bathing area, a special problem when bathing a small child or when cleaning the facility. The header also adds an undesired obstruction in the entryway which must be avoided when entering or leaving the area. Still further, the rail on the tub makes sitting on the edge of the tub undesirable, or uncomfortable at best. Moreover, the metal of the frame and all the glass-to-metal interfaces require special cleaning and maintenance. Apart from these functional constraints, the metal required for the framing, header and rail detracts from a clean and open appearance of the facility.
Although the foregoing disadvantages have been recognized, the known proposed alternatives do not overcome the disadvantages in a commercially acceptable manner. For example, shower doors have been proposed without a header (U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,878,530 to Jean and 5,417,272 to Marlowe et al.), but these doors have frames and still provide inadequate support. The doors in the PCT French publication WO 94/211217 are supported without using a header and do not have the usual frames, but they are believed to lack the support necessary to avoid deflection, as evidenced by the need for corner guides.
Thus, the concept of supporting shower doors in PCT WO 94/211217 would not be acceptable for most applications, particularly for supporting heavy glass doors each weighing from about thirty to fifty pounds. Presumably the WO 94/211217 supporting structure could be made strong enough to support the doors without deflection or sag, but then the structure would be very large, bulky, and unsightly for a bathtub/shower installation. The structure could be made less bulky, but then it would be of reduced strength and incapable of adequately supporting heavy shower doors. Irrespective of its bulk and size, however, the WO 94/211217 design adds protruding metal parts that may be regarded as more obtrusive than the frames and header that have been eliminated.
It is thus emphasized that there are dual problems to solve in providing headerless, frameless shower doors, namely, adequately supporting heavy glass without adversely impacting the appearance of the bathing area. If the sliding glass door sags or rubs or scrapes against the other door or the tub, the installation is commercially unacceptable. If the supporting structure used to support the glass in place of the header and frames is so massive as to be obtrusive in itself, again the installation is commercially unacceptable.